


Ebb Tide

by thegreatpumpkin



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: I know that didn't happen but shhhhh, M/M, Non-Penetrative Sex, Tyelpe in Gondolin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-21 08:50:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4822799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegreatpumpkin/pseuds/thegreatpumpkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she passes, Lómion’s head turns, always. When she is in the room, his shoulders orient in her direction, a lodestone pointing north. He doesn't mean to do it, Tyelpe knows, but the pull is irresistible, as elemental as tides.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ebb Tide

**Author's Note:**

> This one's for snuskens, who deserves way more Fallen Banners than I will ever be able to write!
> 
> Also, inspired by [this alackofghosts tumblr post](http://alackofghosts.tumblr.com/post/129214286837/okay-anon-i-hope-you-see-this-i-just-feel-more), though I went in a slightly different direction with it.

Lómion is like a flower, Tyelpe thinks, though he would not appreciate the comparison. There is something delicate about him, though he is hard and strong from the forge, though he bears much and bears it silently. He is certainly beautiful, though that is not what brought the parallel to mind.

No, it is because—because he always turns his face to the sun.

They call her Silverfoot, but she is more Arien than Tilion; his name is Lómion for the twilight where he thrives, but still he cannot turn away from her light. He doesn't mean to do it, Tyelpe knows, but the pull is irresistible, as elemental as tides. (He wishes that Lómion were the ocean, and he were the moon, but neither is true)

When she passes, Lómion’s head turns, always.

When she is in the room, his shoulders orient in her direction, a lodestone pointing north.

Even when she crosses through silent as a ghost, he knows, he looks. A flower doesn't need to see—it feels the sunlight in its soul, stretches that way with everything in itself.

Tyelpe loves the nights that Lómion comes to him, loves the way they press together with nothing to separate them, loves the way they do nothing but touch. There are too many claims on them both already; they do not claim one another, do not conquer, do not cross the boundaries of the other's body.

He loves it, and wants nothing different—but still, he cannot help thinking: if it were _her_ that Lómion was with, they would.

They would press past the barriers, they would—he would—penetrate her space, and—

They would make love _properly_.

Tyelpe remembers being young, his uncle explaining the logistics to him. Slightly different in the particulars, with a man, with a woman, but in the end it was all the same thing. Not what he and Lómion do together; he's worked out that that is only the barest shadow of what is supposed to be between real lovers, a brief morsel before the full meal.

Though it feels like more.

Though it feels like everything.

He knows that's not true. If it were, Lómion wouldn't turn when she passed—even when in the middle of speaking with Tyelpe, even discussing new alloys, or forge improvements, or any of the other things about which he had passionate opinions. If it were everything, he would be distracted sometimes, would fail to notice sometimes, would let her pass unremarked—

And then comes the time when he does.

Tyelpe almost ruins it. He's become almost as attuned to her presence as Lómion, breaking off his sentence by habit when she appears, so that when Lómion returns to the conversation he won't have missed anything. She's far off in the distance, just a glimpse of golden hair, but it doesn't usually matter.

Lómion doesn't turn, not even when Tyelpe pauses; instead he uses the silence to press his point. "There's so much _more_ we could do with metal. Don't you think? Our people are known for their gemcraft, but we've barely tested the limits of what metal can do. I've learned so much about mithril, and you know gold like a lover—" _Like a lover_ , Tyelpe thinks, and realizes with breathless amazement that Idril is gone again, entirely out of sight.

"Lómion," he interrupts, and his voice is rough. "Can I—Can I take you home?"

Lómion is surprised, confused, but not displeased. His guard comes down for just a moment, and Tyelpe can see in his eyes how much he wants to be wanted. "And continue our conversation there?" he says, carefully, though a hopeful smile is leaning against the corners of his mouth.

"No. But hold that thought, please, I'd like to discuss it later." Even in his giddy desperation, Tyelpe is mild—the sort of powerless, conciliatory speaker his father abhors. He hears himself and resents it, but does not know what other words to use. Instead he looks around to be sure they are unobserved, then lays light fingers against the edge of Lómion's collar. There is a tattoo there, beneath the cloth, that Tyelpe's tongue has painted over many times; Lómion draws breath in a way that says he is thinking of it too. Tyelpe leans in, softly urgent. "Will you come?"

"What has gotten into you?"

Lómion always seeks to understand sudden changes in a person's mood; Tyelpe knows, and wishes he didn't know, that this is because his survival once depended upon predicting those changes. Usually he respects this fear, and does his best to accommodate it. He cannot explain himself now, though; Lómion would not thank him for it.

Tyelpe thinks of the way his uncle can turn everything that leaves his lips into innuendo. Instead of answering, he says, "You have plenty of time for mithril and gold later. Why don't you study... _silver_ for awhile?" It sounded better in his head.

"Tyelperinquar," Lómion murmurs—Tyelpe loves to hear Lómion say his name, his Quenya name, which is why he says _Lómion_ when others say _Maeglin_ — "I don't know what you are trying to do, but you are very bad at it."

He is right—Tyelpe has none of his father's skill with persuasive words, nor Tyelkormo's cleverness with dirty ones. Lómion does not seem to mind, though.

Soon enough they are in Tyelpe's bed, Lómion's eyes bright and his pale skin flushed rosy, warm and electric where it meets Tyelpe's. They move together and Tyelpe wants this, _aches_ for it, but—it isn't everything.

"Why don't we—" he starts, and his voice comes out too soft, too low. _Oh no_ , he thinks, _I am too gone already, I will never be able to ask_ —but Lómion has stilled his stroking hands, removed his burning lips from Tyelpe’s throat and lifted his head, waiting patiently for what he would say. He swallows, steadies himself. “We could go further. You could—have me—if you like.”

Lómion hesitates, and Tyelpe knows this is a gulf he will have to cross very, very carefully if he wants them both to end up on the same side of it. He goes on. “I thought—this is so good, what we do. If there is more I might know of you…”

Once again, he sees that longing in Lómion—that hunger to be desirable, and desired. It wars with some other unnameable drive behind Lómion’s eyes, and Tyelpe wonders if he is asking for something he cannot give. He would never ask to have Lómion beneath him, never suggest that he be the one to cede control—but this, he thinks, is surely within the bounds of safety. He is always so careful to make sure Lómion feels safe.

Or maybe it isn’t that at all. Maybe, despite his earlier distraction, this isn’t more than an amusement for Lómion, and has none of the power of his cousin’s tidal pull. Maybe Tyelpe has been right from the beginning—it isn’t that this is not real because they have not crossed this line. They have not crossed this line, rather, because it is not real.

If he hadn’t asked, he wouldn’t have to know. He regrets it already, wants to go back to pretending, back to the uncertainty that left some _slight_ chance—

“If you want me to,” says Lómion, interrupting his thoughts, tucking the words against the corner of his mouth and then dragging a kiss across the rest of it. It isn’t a ringing vote of enthusiasm, but Tyelpe is so flooded with relief, with—some greater, sweeter emotion—that he hardly notices. They kiss and kiss, and Tyelpe tries to hold himself in check; this is not the main event, though he wants it more than what is to come.

Love is battle, crossing enemy lines, breaching borders; so be it. There will be time, later, for the things Tyelpe wants, the sweet games, but he accepts that they mean nothing and right now he has to _know_.

“How shall we—?” Lómion asks, after a time, and Tyelpe does not notice the pinched lines of his expression because he is too busy noticing how adrenaline pools cold in his own chest.

“I’m sure I have something to—to ease the way.” He rises from the bed, but of course he doesn’t have anything. This was no carefully laid plan, no layered seduction. Only a moment of ecstatic desperation.

“The lamp?” Lómion offers, uncertainly, and it takes Tyelpe far too long to realize he means the oil. There’s a bottle of it to refill the lamp when it runs low; he lifts it from the dressing-table as if there were a Silmaril inside, reverent and careful. They do not touch when he returns to the bed. Tyelpe contemplates the bottle, and Lómion contemplates Tyelpe.

At last Tyelpe breaks the stillness, handing the oil to Lómion— “I’m sorry, could you…?”

Lómion’s fingers curl around his for a moment before he accepts the bottle. “Lie back...I suppose?” He watches Tyelpe ease back into the sheets—but that is not exactly true, for neither of them is at ease. Still, he lies back, drawing his knees up uncertainly, and Lómion scoots forward, pressing a kiss just below his left kneecap.

He fumbles the oil a bit. The sheets will need to be washed, not that it matters, and Lómion’s entire hand is slick (Tyelpe tries to dismiss the image that brings to mind). He wipes it awkwardly on his own thigh, then reaches out to stroke the sensitive bridge of skin behind Tyelpe’s balls.

Even in this strange uncertain moment, he knows how to touch Tyelpe, how to work him, like burnishing silver until it gleams. He kisses Tyelpe’s thigh just above the bend of his knee, then curls his arm around it and continues dragging his lips down the line of muscle that leads, eventually, to his groin. Tyelpe parts his legs wider without being told, Lómion’s kisses burning in the places where they land, and in many parts of him where they do not.

Lómion pauses a hand’s breadth from the line where leg meets body and draws back. His touch changes now, as his fingers slide down over the ring of muscle; still gentle, but somehow distant, as if the warmth of him that still burns along Tyelpe’s thigh belonged to some other lover.

It is all wrong, this coldness, this isle of discomfort in a sea of otherwise well-suited desires.

“Wait—” Tyelpe says, anguished,

“Tyelperinquar—” Lómion says, at the same moment and in a similar tone,

and then they are reaching for one another, coming together less like the pull of tides and more like waves crashing against sand. That is what they are meant to be; they do not breach each other, they do not break each other, they only press skin to skin for the moments that they have together. Soon enough Lómion will withdraw, caught up again in his cousin’s orbit, but it does not change what is between them now.

Tyelpe was wrong to call him a flower. Lómion _is_ the sea; unable to resist the moon, but stretching, always, for the shore.


End file.
